In the last few days, Bravest Hero and father of skepticism ElevatorGATE* got into a bit of hot water when delicate flower Ana Mardoll** got mad at Storify CEO Xavier Damman*** because Ana brought herself to the attention of ElevatorGATE, and wanted to blame someone else for it. The salient parts of this backstory can be found in these two Storify pages: one by ElevatorGATE, and one by LazySavant. John Scalzi (@scalzi on Twitter) recently wrote a blog entry on Storify’s Terms of Service.

People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death.

(George Orwell, 1984)

George Orwell’s dystopian vision of a world of near-total surveillance describes crimethink as a thought that was unacceptable to the ruling party. Following this definition, this reporter proposes the following new word. Read more of this post

The “official” story behind ElevatorGATE’s blog suspension was that an automated anti-spam system flagged it. But there has never been anything even slightly like spam produced by ElevatorGATE. There is a way to report blogs for spam, though, and there is a clique of well-established bullies who found the incentive and just enough of a push from one of their own obsessed members to make ElevatorGATE’s life miserable for a few hours yesterday morning.